Frame Curatorial Research Fellowship Program 2023–2024

The Frame Curatorial Research Fellowships offer support for developing new curatorial research practices and cultivating active practices embedded in an organisational context. It explores what kind of curatorial research is needed in order to imagine new ways of presenting and mediating contemporary art and cultural production in forms inseparable from daily life, politics and the policies of artists and institutions.

The fellowships also provide an opportunity to re-think what the internationality and mobility of curatorial research can mean in the future.

It also aims to embed new forms of ethical curatorial thinking into the daily routines and actions of art organisations and foster new connections within curatorial research, artistic practice, and institutions to reimagine the role of a wide new range of curatorial knowledge within the field of contemporary art. Similarly, it is an opportunity to build new shared futures and alliances between institutions and individuals.

Types of Fellowships

• Curating with Pasts at the Queens Museum
  • The Curating with Pasts fellowship hosted by Frame Contemporary Art Finland and the Queens Museum in New York City looks into different cultural and geopolitical pasts as well as material realities as a point of departure for curatorial research and artistic imaginaries. The fellowship rethinks how historical shifts between the New York World Fairs’ cultural exchange (1939–40 & 1964–65), Cold War dichotomies, and 90s globalisation can resonate with and inform artistic, curatorial and institutional practices today.
  • In the context of Frame, the fellowship looks into how contemporary art and art institutions’ working contexts are bound to cultural and political imaginaries of the recent past.
  • In the context of Queens Museum, the fellowship looks into the museum’s history and context in relation to world fair archives and United Nations’ first meetings. Founded in 1972, the Museum is located in the nation’s most culturally diverse county, on the grounds of the 1939–1940 and 1964–1965 New York World’s Fairs, and in a building that formerly housed the United Nations from 1946 to 1950.
• Soils Fellowship at the Van Abbemuseum
  • The Soils Fellowship is hosted by Frame Contemporary Art Finland and Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. It aims to understand how art institutions and curatorial practice can position themselves better within their immediate environments and move beyond the classical binaries of the local and the international, the city and the village, the grounded and the global.
  • Within the context of Frame, the fellowship aims to understand how art institutions and curatorial practice can learn from their immediate nature-cultural environment and how far they can go to change their mission and vision.
  • In the context of the Van Abbemuseum, the Soils Fellowship is focused on a long-term research and exhibition project that will have its Dutch public presentation starting in June 2024. The project is collaborated with TarraWarra Museum of Art in Healesville, Australia and Struggles for Sovereignty based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.
  • The project involves working with artists and activists based in the three states and often coming from or working with indigenous, Aboriginal and locally grounded communities. It seeks to build a thoughtful relationship between art institutions and their immediate agriculture and rural surroundings while comparing local situations and building coalitions.

Benefits

• The Fellowships include:
  • Support for the research and introduction to the partners’ contexts.
  • 12 000 EUR working grant for 4 months for each fellow between autumn 2023 and spring 2024.
  • Two to three research visits hosted by Frame and the collaborating partner.
  • Small production budget to present the research, in the form of e.g. seminar, talk or text.

Requirements and Accessibility

• Frame Curatorial Research Fellowship can be applied to everyone from anywhere in the world whose practice and interests connect to the frameworks of the fellowships. Applicants do not need an institutionalised curatorial background, working position or education.
• They welcome applicants of all ages, genders and linguistic, cultural and other minorities. Fellowships are open to individuals with different disabilities and neuro-divergences.

For more information, visit Frame Contemporary Art Finland.